THE INVISIBLE WOMAN

This article is available to subscribers only, in our archive viewer. Get immediate access to this article for just $1 a week by subscribing now.

PERSONAL HISTORY about the author's look at the feminist movement, reflecting on a Profile she wrote for The New Yorker about the women's revolution in 1970, and the time she spent in Morocco. In early 1970, when Kramer was three years married, and three months pregnant she attended a meeting in an Upper East Side studio, where thirty women had gathered to approve the bylaws of "the women's revolution." Describes orgies of the sexual revolution. Kramer was writing about Allen Ginsberg and went to the Esalen Instituted and stepped naked, with Ginsberg, into a sulfurous bath and then, passed out. Kramer's husband is an anthropologist and in the late sixties, was doing field work in Morocco. Kramer's best friend was, Amina, a girl of thirteen, about to be married, who lived in a Berber village called Ait Amar, in the Middle Atlas Mountains. Describes Amina's wedding where her husband deflowered her on the floor of a hut. Amina's conversations were much like those of the women at the conscious-raising sessions that were held on the Upper East Side. Every three months Kramer had to leave Morocco to get her passport stamped. She and her husband would travel to Tangier and then take the boat to Gibraltar, have lunch, and then return to Morocco. Describes incident where her husband was detained in Tangier because of a minor visa problem, and Kramer was seized with terror at having to journey into Gibraltar alone. Kramer had endless talks with her husband about it. He had noticed in Morocco how, if she asked a man a question, that man would usually look at her husband, or at her field assistant, and answer him, as if she wasn't there. The women who had gathered in Manhattan had all felt this damage, the same shattering invisibility. Describes how The New Yorker published the article about the women's liberation using pseudonyms, and Kramer named the women after real women in her family. The group dissolved five months after the first meeting. Kramer's daughter inhabits a world where there is an illusion that the women's revolution is a solid rock. Diane Elam, the feminist philosopher, described today's feminists as "a political communitv that is negotiating a whole set of questions."